NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Tech circles are abuzz about augmented reality and the future of mobile utility and marketing.

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Bruno Uzzan is CEO of Total Immersion, a Los Angeles-headquartered developer that’s worked with augmented reality since 2001 and recently created the Topps baseball-card application that integrates players’ 3-D avatars with traditional trading cards. We talked to him about the challenges of mobile AR and how marketers should be thinking about this promising technology. Here are his answers, lightly edited.

Ad Age: How does augmented reality work on phones?

Mr. Uzzan: To access AR, you need a screen, a computer and a video camera. Now we have all those on phones. The first AR apps on phones use the GPS and compass — you can use your phone to look at a building and get some information on that building or know where the closest restaurants are. But that’s only the beginning.

Ad Age: How will mobile AR evolve?

Mr. Uzzan: For now, you can do mobile AR on a building or location, but not on a fixed object, like a package, because right now the tracking requires external information from the GPS and the compass. To do the tracking directly on the phone [without requiring location data], we need video functionalities and enough computation capacity to understand objects the phone is looking at. … That’s one of the biggest challenges for a company like Total Immersion: How can we use less computation power than what’s on computers, but still create a robust AR experience on mobile?